1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of implementing a plurality of system tray areas and, more particularly, to a method of implementing system tray areas in a shell program, which is suitable for an intelligent apparatus having a system tray area.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the display of the typical information apparatus, a row of menus along a bottom portion of the display screen is called toolbar, and a system tray area is placed on the right side of the toolbar and is used for displaying various icons within the system tray area, such as icons that call programs for printer and volume control, input device settings, network status information, time settings or other external programs, which enable a user to click on the icons to quickly execute the associated program.
However, size of the icon for the prior art system tray area is defined as a 16×16 pixel area, and is often too small for the user. The user has to first precisely move the mouse pointer onto the icon and then click to execute the associated program, which is very inconvenient.
The above-mentioned problem is even more obvious on a pen-based device, such as a tablet PC or a personal digital assistant (PDA), etc. These apparatuses utilize a touch pen or a finger to touch a panel to provide input. But there is a little gap between the panel and a sensor for receiving the touch signal from the panel, which results in inaccuracy between a coordinate value selected by the touch pen or the finger and a coordinate value detected by the sensor. Therefore, due to small icon sizes and the narrow spacing between the icons, it is difficult for the user to select an icon on the system tray area. For example, the user may want to select the icon for volume control, but the sensor of the pen-based device generates a touch signal for the input device control icon.
Furthermore, in a single system tray area, it is impossible to separate the icons related to functionality from those icons that simply display a state (i.e., a power state); and the operating mode is not adjustable.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method for implementing system tray areas to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.